Although the beginning and end are a bit unfocused, the center of the book contains an enlightening overview of the legal and social factors influencing the emergence of a "right to be forgotten." She does muddy the discussion by often referring to this as a right to be forgiven, which raise unnecessary and complicating considerations. I suspect most librarians would view the idea of purging true information in order to placate modern sensitivities as the antithesis of what they strive to do: to preserve. ( )

I'm not completely sure where to start or what to even say about this book. This is not a book for a layperson to this legal arena. If you're looking for intro level, I would say to look elsewhere. However, if you are a professional litigator, I can see this being an interesting read especially if you have previous knowledge in this specific field. Since I am a layperson, I just don't think this book was for me.

The writing is incredibly dense and not particularly organized. Considering the sheer volume of information and theories put forward it would have been nice to see it broken into smaller chunks with headers. The layout just runs from one thought process to another with no real warning to change the direction your mental gears are heading in.

Besides the layout, I felt that a lot of the information was just a bunch of copypasta on laws and theories with no real thesis behind it. This is not a book that takes a position and presents it, instead there are just a lot of competing ideas thrown at you for interpretation on your own. Or at least, if there was a position being presented I never picked up on it.

Again, I think this book just wasn't meant for me, so I don't like giving it a lower rating, but it reflects my actual enjoyment of the book. There was a lot of good information, but it was hard to parse it all apart as a layperson. This book would be much better suited to someone already in the field, or a lawyer in general who is interested in the topic.

Copy courtesy of NYU Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )

Free review copy. I was hoping for a more straightforward philosophical defense of the right to be forgotten—to remove once-public information from public view, or at least to make it harder to find—but the book was not quite that. A lot of summaries of others’ work/theories. Jones does argue for some limited right to be forgotten, because too much focus on the past prevents people from moving forward. She bases her claims in part on the idea that forgiving (and forgetting) is healthy for people (“those who forgive exhibit greater empathy, understanding, tolerance, agreeableness, and insight”), which I find … dubious, in part because of correlation/causation issues, and in part because I want to know whether the wrongdoer to be forgiven has accepted responsibility for the harm caused. Jones does note that forgiveness can itself be unjust, especially when offered by a third party, but I think that makes the right to be forgotten troubling, because that’s often exactly what it involves—Google deciding (at the prodding of European authorities) when the person whose information is at issue has suffered enough.

Jones compares American and European attitudes and concludes that the American constitutional tradition precludes an aggressive right to be forgotten, while the European tradition enables it. The US, with its extreme definitions of newsworthiness and free speech trumping most privacy claims, is now a land of choices rather than second chances. By contrast, Europe is trying harder to provide people with second chances. But not without trouble: Jones points out that in “[a]ttempting to knock Google down a few pegs, the CJEU instead further empowered the search giant by essentially putting the right to be forgotten in the company’s hands” by requiring Google to decide whether there was enough public interest to preserve information rather than by requiring right to be forgotten requests to be approved by data protection agencies in the relevant countries, who would do the balancing under their own national principles. I wasn’t aware that, under Swiss law, it’s possible to suppress information about criminal convictions even if they’re newsworthy if significant rehabilitation efforts have been made—so the courts have prevented publications about white-collar crimes, bank robberies, and even a 1980 documentary about a man sentenced to death in 1939. In 2003, meanwhile, Sweden prosecuted a citizen for “posting information about her work colleagues on her personal webpage without obtaining their consent.” And Europe wants the right to be forgotten to apply to all Google sites, so that the results will disappear for everyone (or at least will disappear even if a European uses .com).

Jones contends that the more common digital information problem is one of easy decay/disappearance, and thus we should think of digital information holistically, conceiving of the question as one of proper stewardship. “[T]he internet is a lazy historian with no principled practices of preserving or protecting knowledge.” She would distinguish data, especially data used to track and market to us, from content we create, and make it easier for us to delete the former. The right to be forgotten should be part of information stewardship, in her view, because cultural change allowing our stupidities to be forgiven despite their continuing availability won’t happen fast enough (“Adults see questionable content not as the testing ground of youths that they may have learned and grown from but as negative and stable characteristics of their personalities.”), and because humans have cognitive biases that lead them to be unable to properly discount negative information, even when it’s outdated. We need to be able to draw lines around our personas to create the “face” which is necessary for people to survive among other people. One possibility is a right of reply-like scheme where we would get to provide “context” to information about us that is too old or unrepresentative, or—particularly in the US—laws precluding the use of certain information in certain ways, such as old bankruptcies or juvenile criminal records. Ultimately, she thinks that “coding forgiveness” could be automated after there’s enough experience implementing a right to be forgotten (which seems literally fantastic to me; this isn’t like identifying full, unaltered copies of movies, and even that automation works only part of the time). I did like the concept of “good enough” privacy—information doesn’t have to be completely unfindable to be protective of a person’s privacy. ( )